Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End

As recently as 1960 few women worked outside the home married women could not borrow money in their own names schools imposed strict quotas on female applicants and sexual harassment did not exist as a legal concept. In Tidal Wave Sara M. Evans one of our foremost historians of women in America draws on an extraordinary range of interviews archives and published sources to tell for the first time the incredible story of the past forty years in womens history. Encompassing the so-called Second Wave of feminism (1960s and 1970s) and the Third Wave (1980s and 1990s) Evans challenges traditional interpretations of womens history at every turn. Covering politics economics popular culture marriage and family and including the perspectives of women ranging from leaders of NOW to little-known women who simply wanted more out of their lives Tidal Wave paints a vast canvas of a society in upheaval. The movements shocking success is evinced Evans notes by the simple fact that we now live in a country in which all women are feminists in practice if not in name.